A Great Set of IronRuby Tutorials To Bring C# Developers Into The Ruby Fold

IronRuby is a .NET implementation of Ruby being developed by Microsoft (specifically, by John Lam). The project has matured significantly in the past year, and IronRuby is well on its way to running Rails applications (it already works with very simple ones). IronRuby's major benefit is that it allows Ruby code to access a massive range of .NET libraries and services.

Justin Etheredge has put together a great set of tutorial blog posts designed to get you up to speed with IronRuby:

Getting IronRuby Up and Running walks you through getting the source code, compiling it with Visual Studio 2008 (if you don't have this, a link to the free "Express" edition is provided), associating the .rb file extension, and running some initial tests.

Justin seems to have a real knack for putting these tutorials together, and they seem to be popular with C# developers, so if you want to point any C# or .NET stalwarts you know to Ruby, these posts are a great starting point.

I find IronRuby very interesting ever since I've done some small C++ .Net side projects. However the Windows-hassle in that first article is amazing. But maybe it's because the whole 'add sn.exe to your path' takes up half the article :)